


How Come You Do Me Like You Do?

by Glassdarkly



Series: SB Fag Ends Drabbles and Short Fics: BtVS season 6 [14]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Dysfunctional Relationships, F/M, Prompt Fic, Short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-05
Updated: 2013-09-05
Packaged: 2017-12-25 17:11:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/955653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glassdarkly/pseuds/Glassdarkly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An out-take from the long, slow car crash of Buffy's season 6 relationship with Spike. Around the time of <i>Wrecked/Gone.</i></p><p>First posted in March 2013 to the SB Fag Ends Comm on Livejournal. For the theme: Murder Most Foul. For the prompt: Murder to a Jazz Beat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How Come You Do Me Like You Do?

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this ficlet is that of a 1920s Louis Armstrong jazz standard

Buffy put her hands over her ears as Johnny Rotten rang the last discordant snarl out of the word 'destroy.'

"How can you listen to this stuff? It's horrible!"

Spike shut his battered old refrigerator. Lit cigarette hanging from his lower lip, he poured blood from a container into a chipped mug, glared at her over the rim, and downed the contents in one. 

"What's wrong with it?"

Buffy bit her lip, trying not to stare at his pale, hairless chest. Damn him! Why couldn't he button his shirt? 

"It's not music," she insisted. "It's just....noise. _He_ can't sing. _They_ can't play."

"Yeah, well..." Spike had gotten that look on his face he sometimes had. Like he despised her and pitied her all at the same time...."they said the same about jazz back in the day."

"Who did?"

He took a long drag on his cigarette, eyes never leaving hers. "The stuck up, stuck in the past types. Shocked rigid by it, they were. Couldn't deal with anything new - outside their comfort zone. Anything they couldn't control." 

He exhaled a thin stream of blue smoke through flared nostrils. "Bit like you, love, when you think about it."

Buffy bristled. What was eating _him_ this evening? 

"I am not stuck in the past. Anyway, the Sex Pistols are, like, twenty-five years old. If anyone's stuck in the past, it's you." She turned to go. "I've had a hell of a day. I don't need crap from you on top of all the other crap."

Somehow or other - she wasn't quite sure how - he'd gotten between her and the crypt door. 

"Come on, Slayer. Don't be like that." A cold finger ran the length of her bare arm, raising goosebumps. 

Raising other things too, which she'd rather not draw attention to, though from the smirk on his face, he'd already noticed. 

"Don't be mean, then," she shot back. 

He shrugged. "Vampire," he said, as if that explained everything. _And maybe it did_. "Let me make it up to you, okay?" 

His hand brushed her hip, drifted down her thigh, under her skirt and up again. She felt her knees turn to jelly and sagged against him. 

"You can try."

*

At some point during the evening, they'd made it down the ladder into the undercrypt and onto the bed. She lay on her belly, watching the rise and fall of his breathing, which sometimes, when he forgot, would stop altogether. Her ass hurt. In fact, all of her hurt, but in a good way.

The silence dragged on a while, shading imperceptibly from post-boink contentment into restless clock-watching on her part. Carefully, so's he wouldn't notice, she moved her foot around the bottom of the bed, feeling for her panties. 

But he knew. He always knew. 

His head snapped around suddenly, blue eyes narrowed, and he opened his mouth to say something cutting and cruel, or maybe just to ask, as he so often did, what was the damn hurry. 

"So how do you know all that stuff?" she said, quickly, forestalling him. "About jazz, I mean?"

He stared at her. "How d'you bloody think, Slayer? Lived through the Jazz Age, didn't I? Saw it up close and personal."

She blinked. Despite what she'd said about him being stuck in the past, he didn't feel.... _old_. Not like Angel. Hard to remember he'd lived for so long. 

Interested suddenly, she sat up.

"What was it like?"

A vision danced across her inner eye - Spike and Drusilla in some dimly-lit speakeasy, wreaths of cigarette smoke, the golden flare of saxophones. Drusilla's hair was bobbed. There were strings of bloodstained pearls around her long, slender neck. _No, don't think about that._

"Did you wear a hat, like Al Capone?"

He turned on his side, propping his head on his elbow. "Everyone wore hats then, so yeah. I did. Had a moustache too, like Douglas Fairbanks." 

_Who?_

"It sounds so glamorous."

The cool finger was back, tracing the line of her collar bone. "S'pose it was. The shock of the new, an' all that - the clothes, the music. Especially the music. Came to this country for the first time during Prohibition. Never been off my head so much again since, not even in the sixties." 

His eyes sparked gold. "Never fed so well either."

She pushed his hand away, threw off the comforter and scrabbled for her clothes. "Get _off_ me."

"Hey, it's not like you didn't know." He lay on his back, head resting on his folded arms, watching her dress. "All those empty-headed flappers just gagging for it." 

"Shut up." She turned her back on him, acutely aware of his eyes on her body as she dressed. 

He laughed suddenly, a short, bitter sound. "See, I told you."

She was buttoning her jacket. Turning around, she found his face gone hard, eyes glassy and cold, as if he hated her. Which maybe he did.

"Told me what?" She looked at her watch. "And make it quick. I have important stuff to do."

He surged out of bed suddenly, stark naked in front of her. 

"Now you've done the unimportant stuff, you mean? Like me?"

She caught her breath, but then made herself look away. "I don't have time for this, Spike."

"Run along, then," he said. "I'm not keeping you."

"Like you could." Stiff-backed, she made for the ladder. She wouldn't come here again. She would _not_.

"Can't deal with it, can you?" he said, low and vicious. 

She paused on the bottom rung, looked back at him over her shoulder. "What are you talking about?"

His eyes were like stone. "I'm not your pet any more, Slayer. This is new. Like jazz. Like Johnny fucking Rotten. This is out of your control, and you just. Can't. Take it."

She started climbing again. "Stay away from me."

"If you want." She heard the snap of his lighter, scented cigarette smoke. "Something tells me, though, I won't have to."


End file.
